Van Buitenen brings Olaf’s flaws to the fore

The charges and counter-charges about the EU’s anti-fraud office suggest that Olaf is dysfunctional.

European Voice

12/10/08, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 1/22/16, 1:12 PM CET

The publication by Paul van Buitenen, the former European Commission whistleblower who became an MEP, of a dossier about Olaf, the EU’s anti-fraud office, smacks of an attempt to recreate the past. Ten years ago, van Buitenen, then a financial controller for the Commission, submitted a dossier to the Green party. The dossier was taken up by the European Parliament and eventually forced the resignation of the European Commission led by Jacques Santer.

That experience brought van Buitenen to the European Parliament in 2004, as a member of the Green group, and it shaped his political image. Ten years on from those first revelations, once again a few months away from European Parliament elections, van Buitenen publishes another dossier. So will this one have as dramatic effects?

Ingeborg Grässle, a German MEP who is spokesperson for the centre-right on the budgetary control committee, thinks not. She dismissed van Buitenen’s dossier as “nothing new” and said he was “obviously looking for an issue for his electoral campaign”. At least Franz-Hermann Brüner, the embattled director-general of Olaf, can count on support from the German centre-right. But does he deserve it?

Brüner, like Grässle, has dismissed van Buitenen’s charges as being old material, but that is not a terribly sophisticated rebuttal. True, newspapers like this one may be obsessed with what is new, but what should matter to voters and MEPs is whether the charges have substance. If they do, and if the old material has simply been ignored, then that does not invalidate van Buitenen’s complaints, it just explains his sense of frustration.

There is some new material, albeit only the most recent developments in some very long-running cases. The Commission’s investigatory and disciplinary office reported only at the end of November on one of the four cases that van Buitenen describes. Olaf has said that “no grounds for disciplinary action were found”, though “administrative shortcomings were identified”. At the heart of the case is a question as to why Brüner allowed a selection process for an Olaf director to begin, knowing that one of the people on the selection panel was under investigation by Olaf; Brüner, who has changed his position about when he was told of the conflict of interest, did not consider it a serious problem. It is not the only instance of poor judgement by Brüner.

On another case, about a Commission-funded development organisation, the main charge is that Olaf sat on information and did not pursue an investigation against an individual until another MEP, Brian Simpson, took up the cause of a whistleblower. Olaf confirms that that investigation is now active – so why was there a two-year delay? Van Buitenen alleges incompetence and interference.

The dossier also shows that as recently as the end of October, Brüner wrote to the Parliament’s budgetary control committee complaining that van Buitenen had accompanied a whistleblower who was being interviewed by Olaf. In a spectacularly crass intervention, Brüner questions whether this role of “trusted representative” is compatible with van Buitenen’s being an MEP and a member of the budgetary control committee.

Stepping back from the detail, what the dossier’s succession of charge and counter-charge shows is that Brüner is presiding over a divided Olaf. Frustrated investigators are leaking information against their senior managers to van Buitenen and Brüner is pursuing leak inquiries. It is a sad picture of a dysfunctional organisation.

The Commission protests that it cannot interfere in the operational independence of Olaf. The question that lingers is what Olaf’s supervisory panel, which is supposed to provide some kind of external check on Olaf’s conduct, has been doing. The panel’s performance appears to be meek going on mediocre.

What Olaf needs – and it is not provided for in the prescription drawn up by Grässle – is a stronger supervisory panel and a change of leadership. Brüner was already damaged goods. Van Buitenen’s dossier is not strong enough to force Brüner’s resignation, but it wounds him nonetheless.